Windows 8 introduced the concept of a Windows “App”. This has moved forward through Windows 8.1 and Windows 10.

Effectively, these “Apps” are what was formerly referred to as “Metro” and is now called the Modern UI. They use something of a different interface paradigm, with different controls and with elements typically sized for easier touch-screen use. That’s all well and good.

With Windows 8, 8.1, and 10, using these Apps tends to be optional. For the most part, there are equivalents you can use. A good example is Control panel; there is a “Settings” App which has some options, but for the most part there is a overlap with the “old style” Control Panel.

Recently, however, I needed to open an App for whatever reason. Or maybe I opened it by accident. Rather than the app opening, me being annoyed, and then closing the App, it instead said “This app can’t open” and suggested that I perform a Refresh to fix it. This sent me down something of a rabbit hole- Searching online for fixes, trying them, getting weird results, etc.

Actually, I’ve jumped in the ring to wrestle these issues a few times- I’ve had it on at least one my systems for ages and it recently appeared on another. Being unable to make some changes to the system was annoying enough that I decided to fix the issue- which, again, sent me down the rabbit hole. Try this command. Try this other one. Didn’t work? use this Troubleshooter that doesn’t do anything useful. Didn’t work? I don’t know. maybe try refreshing your PC after all?

Eventually, I stumbled, almost by accident, on the solution. Many of the attempts were encountering an error about “The package repository is corrupted”. I found nothing addressing that except some statements about registry key permissions, which I checked and were fine. So I decided to find where this package repository was- C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\AppRepository- and nuke it completely. I deleted the entire contents of the folder, then ran the command again. I expected a different error or something, but that seems to have done the trick, and now those Apps all work again.

Effectively, the Windows Store/App stuff is something of a “Package Manager” and stores the package information in that folder. However it also has an index of the package information in a smaller repository file, and it seems that file can get corrupted. I tried deleting that as well but it never fixed it. I ended up going with the nuke-it-from-orbit option.

My full list of steps was:

Delete contents of C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\AppRepository
Deleted all the files inside this folder. Quite satisfying.

Ran an arbitrary non-obvious command from an administrator command prompt

Ran a final non-obvious program from the command prompt
After all this, other apps were still causing problems, like the useless Music app or the useless mail app or the various other useless apps that are provided and available. I’m not one to leave a hippo in vinegar, so I ran one more thing- I opened Windows Search and typed “wsreset” which brought up wsreset, then I right-clicked it and selected to run as administrator. After doing so, all the apps I had started working properly again.

I’d like to pause for a moment, however- to really admire how poorly engineered something has to be for almost any problem with it to declare that the user should try nuking everything and starting over. Microsoft calls it a “Windows Refresh” but it is a reinstall, and suggesting users reinstall an OS to fix these issues is absolutely ridiculous. Another very comical aspect to this is that in the “Windows versus Linux” argument, Windows diehards will complain that Linux requires arcane terminal commands to fix issues. Now, it’s hard to argue that- some issues in Linux distributions could require dropping to the terminal to fix issues with particular commands. But given the above- it doesn’t look like Windows is any stranger to that anymore.